Chef Damion Norton caters a lunch for members of Long Branch Baptist Church. On the menu was a salad with seared salmon over saffron rice with vegetables. / photos by MYKAL McELDOWNEY / Staff

Chef Damion Norton caters a lunch for members of Long Branch Baptist Church on Tuesday, October 15, 2013. On the menu was a salad with seared salmon over saffron rice with vegetables. / MYKAL McELDOWNEY/Staff

Chef Damion Norton talks about his plans for the young chefs culinary school at greenvilleonline.com/e.

Chef Damion Norton caters a lunch for members of Long Branch Baptist Church on Tuesday, October 15, 2013. On the menu was a salad with seared salmon over saffron rice with vegetables. / MYKAL McELDOWNEY/Staff

Norton is working on starting a cooking school for middle and high school students.

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Damion Norton has worked for some of the largest hotel companies and restaurant groups in four cities, but he has always considered himself an entrepreneur.

That’s why earlier this week he left his job as chef at Ford’s Oyster House in the West End to have more time to work on buying a catering company and opening a culinary arts school for students in middle and high school.

“It’s a crucial age,” Norton said. “Peer pressure is there, and it rises up at you, but, oh my goodness, if you can do this you are looking at it in a totally different way.”

Norton, 41, found a home in the kitchen as a student at Macedonia High School in the lower part of state. He had played football and basketball in ninth grade and enrolled in auto mechanics, but home economics captured his imagination.

He worked at Burger King all through high school.

It was the start of what would become a career that has taken him through 30 restaurants and taught him to make pretty much any cuisine that exists.

His home ec teacher saw something special and arranged a meeting with representatives of Johnson & Wales University, which at the time had a campus in Charleston and is considered one of the best culinary arts schools in the world.

He earned a full scholarship and finished his degree in 2 ½ years, all while working in the soft kitchen — soups, sauces — for the restaurant group that owns Tommy Condon’s, A.W. Shucks and Bocci’s.

He had two goals for after graduation: Move to Atlanta, work at the Marriott Marquis downtown. He did move to Atlanta, and every day he drove to the MARTA station and rode the train downtown.

Every day he spoke to the same woman in human resources at the Marriott. For two weeks. Any news on his application? he would ask.

Finally, the woman took him into the kitchen and told the chef Norton was her cousin, recently moved to the area. Would the chef interview him? The chef responded, “When do you want to start?” By the time Norton left three years later, he had become operations manager of one of the five restaurants in the hotel.

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In the dozen years Norton lived in Atlanta, he always had a second job in the restaurant business, including a couple of years when he ran his own catering company.

“That was my first real experience as an entrepreneur,” he said.

Then came an opportunity to join Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. The man who had been an executive chef, a manager, took a job as a line cook. It provided entry to the job he really wanted, executive chef.

“That is the message I would send to young cooks. If you have a desire to be in a certain position, you need to be performing to that degree,” he said.

Before long, he not only became executive chef, but he also was sent to Columbia to open a new Ruth’s Chris in the Hilton.

The job offered comfort and predictability but not a lot of creativity, he said. That’s when he moved to Greenville and to Ford’s, joining three weeks after the restaurant opened in 2011.

The job showed him — and allowed him to become part of — Greenville’s growing food culture.

“Greenville is becoming a foodie town,” he said.

And it is becoming a place where healthy eating is taking hold. Norton said he wants to be part of that effort, and to start young.

“I want to develop a group of young chefs that understand how to eat healthy,” he said.

His path, he said, is clear. He’s taken a job as food and beverage director at the Residence at Park Place, a 70-bed retirement home in Seneca. That will ensure he’s home at a regular hour to have dinner with his wife, Cortney, and their two small children. It gives him more time for his three older children, who live with their mother in Atlanta.

And it allows time to plan for the culinary arts school to open in January.

Eventually, he expects to buy a catering company on Woodruff Road. The culinary school will be run from there as well.

Here’s another message he has for young people: “You’re a business. You already have everything you need to be successful.”